The invention relates to a motor vehicle having an input apparatus for operating an electronic device in the motor vehicle. The invention also includes an input apparatus having a character or handwriting recognition section and also a method for operating the input apparatus.
In a vehicle having a navigation system or an infotainment system, an input apparatus can be used to search a navigation database for a place name by drawing letters on an input surface by hand.
Such an input device is known from EP 1 475 693 A2, for example. According to this, a user inputs individual letters by respectively drawing a character trace of the letter on an input surface, for example a touchscreen. On the basis of the character trace, a handwriting recognition device then performs character recognition and thus recognizes the character that the user means, that is to say in this case the letter. The character trace displayed on a screen is then replaced with the recognized letter. In this way, the user can input the beginning of a place name in handwriting letter by letter, which place name is then automatically completed where possible on the basis of a database search if the place name can be determined unambiguously from the previously input letters.
One problem with the use of handwriting recognition systems is that a character trace cannot always be unambiguously associated with a particular character. For example, if the user draws a vertical line “|”, this line may mean the uppercase letter I, the lowercase letter l or else the number 1. A handwriting recognition system then outputs as the recognition result that character which matches the character trace to the greatest extent. If the user has written in a scruffy manner and the recognition result is therefore incorrect, the input by the user in the case described above is sometimes automatically augmented to produce a place name that the user did not mean at all. It is then unclear to the user why the input apparatus suddenly displays this incorrect place name.